Performance evaluation of land mobile satellite system under fading and interference using multiple TCM by Monte-Carlo simulation

The performance of the land mobile satellite system (LMSS) was evaluated by using two trellis coded modulation (TCM) schemes under multipath fading and interference. The results were also compared with uncoded QPSK. The trellis coding formats included a trellis code designed for optimum performance on the fading channel that typifies satellite to mobile communications, as well as one designed for optimum performance in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The results show that, in Rayleigh fading, the TCM code designed for optimum performance in such an environment performs 4 dB better than the TCM code designed for optimum performance in AWGN, and 10 dB better than the uncoded format, at a bit error rate (BER) of 10^-4. Additional results on the performance degradation due to the nonlinearities in the satellite transponder and the adjacent and cochannel interference show that the TCM system is more sensitive than the uncoded system to the phase distortion caused by these impairments